Is Portkey free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
There is a free developer tier; paid plans start around $99/month for the pro feature set, with enterprise pricing on request. The gateway itself is separately available as open source under the MIT licence, so the subscription buys the hosted control plane, dashboards, guardrails and support rather than the routing engine. Verified against Portkey's published pricing on 2026-07-30; AI pricing moves quickly, so confirm before committing.
When paying is still the right call
If you want routing, caching, guardrails and observability working this afternoon with nothing to operate, Portkey is a reasonable purchase and the self-hosted options genuinely cost more in engineering time than the subscription. It also makes sense for teams without anyone who wants to own a piece of production infrastructure, and for organisations that need the compliance paperwork a vendor can supply and a self-hosted binary cannot.
What you are locked into
Light by the standards of this market, and worth saying so plainly — the gateway speaks the OpenAI-compatible API, so pointing your client at a different base URL is usually the whole migration. What does not move is the accumulated layer around it: prompt templates, guardrail configuration, virtual keys and the observability history all live in Portkey's control plane.
If you would rather not pay: LiteLLM
LiteLLM
One OpenAI-compatible API in front of 100+ providers, running on your own box.
Free and self-hosted — you pay the model providers directly with no markup, plus hosting for a small VM (roughly $20–50/month). A paid enterprise tier exists for SSO, audit logs and support.
See all 4 Portkey alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Portkey AI before you commit. More llm gateways & routing decisions on Macrostack.